The Failover Operation

Following a disaster, use the Failover operation to recover protected virtual machines to the recovery site. A failover assumes that connectivity between the sites might be down, and thus the protected virtual machines and disks are not removed, as they are in a planned Move operation.

When you set up a failover you always specify a checkpoint to which you want to recover the virtual machines. When you select a checkpoint – either the last automatically generated checkpoint, an earlier checkpoint, or a tagged checkpoint – Zerto makes sure that virtual machines at the remote site are recovered to this specified point-in-time. For details, see Managing Failover.

Note:

To identify the checkpoint to use, you can perform a number of test failovers, each to a different checkpoint.

Failback after the Original Site is Operational

After completing a failover, when the original site is back up and running you can move the recovered virtual machines back again using the Move operation. For details, see Moving Protected Virtual Machines to a Remote Site.

The following diagram shows the positioning of the virtual machines before and after the completion of a Failover operation.

Note:

The Failover operation leaves the VPG in a Recovered state.